Open source, here we come!
Duo of the moment
Akarsha and Ramya are not your regular individuals, a dash of crazy, a drop of weird and a couple of undiscovered unusual ingredients makes them up. They can be found studying in the same college of IIIT Delhi and sharing the same hostel room, adding a whole new meaning to birds of a feather flock together. Their acquaintance started with their mutual interest in coding and fascination for artificial intelligence. Slowly but steadily they started bonding and realized that despite one being from North India and the other from South, one being a die hard Korean fan and the other a Game of Thrones fan, they are eerily similar. Their sun signs (which both are extremely fond of) also matched! While looking for the perfect team name, ‘Gemini’ which literally means ‘The Twins’ made perfect sense. In the short span of two years, they have managed to gather all sorts of memories with each other, reading for tests together, doing assignments together, bickering and laughing the next moment, watching youtube videos, heated discussions on random topics or just not seeing eye to eye with one other. They’ve been through it all and vehemently attest that their bond keeps going strong because of all their experiences together.
Fun facts about the team
Akarsha:
- Didn’t manage to grow up beyond the age of 14 :p
- She is too excited about every new thing that comes her way.
- She is a die hard Korean fan (finds them cute for some reason) and her long time dream is to visit South Korea. Though I am pretty sure she would love to visit any place as long as she gets to travel.
- She is a confused soul with a 100 things on her plate.
- She dreams to be a successful Entrepreneur.
- Wants her life to be fun filled and exciting always.
Ramya:
- Keeps her stuff really clean :P
- Very lazy at times. Mastered the art of doing more in less
- Loves fan-fiction, can’t survive without Harry Potter fanfics at least once a week
- Gets her fat from nowhere(she hardly eats anything.. And if she does, she exercises to burn those calories)
- Wants to know about anything and everything interesting under the sun and gets very excited every time she manages to do this. Her youtube feed is filled with random explanations about random things
- Wants her life to be one of adventure and magic
The Crew
Coaches
Akshay Agarwal
He is a doctoral student working in the field of biometrics and machine learning at IIITD. He has completed his Mtech in from IIIT Allahabad. He recently went to West Virginia University for a 9-month Internship program. He also works in other fields like Pattern recognition, Face recognition, face spoofing, Image analysis to name a few.
Shiven Mian
He is a junior at IIITD, majoring in Computer science, Polygot Programmer, passionate about Opensource, with a side of research. Shiven is a 2016 GSoC intern with Fossasia and worked in Loklak.
Aditay Tripathi
He has just completed his MTech from our college only and did his BTech from NIT Shrinagar. He is an AI enthusiast in Research and applications of Machine learning/deep learning in speech recognition and computer vision. He is well versed with various libraries like Kaldi, Tensorflow, Theano and Keras.
Our Mentors
Stefan van der Walt
He is an assistant researcher at BIDS and a senior lecturer in applied mathematics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has been involved in the development of scientific open source software for more than a decade and enjoys teaching Python at workshops and conferences. Stéfan is the founder of scikit-image and a contributor to numpy, scipy, and dipy.
Juan Nunez-Iglesias
He is a research scientist at the University of Melbourne, with interests in neuroscience and biological image analysis. He is also a freelance consultant in scientific Python programming, with a particular interest in renewable energy and the environment.Also, he is the author of the book Elegant SciPy, published by O’Reilly media.
A big thank you to our new mentors for taking us on board at such a short notice!
Supervisor
Vaishali
She is an Open Source enthusiast and works as a Linux kernel engineer at Oracle. She is also a blogger and outreachy alumni. She motivates everyone to get started with linux kernel and also takes up workshops for the same.
Our Project(s)
About Susi-AI Server
Susi AI is an open source artificial Intelligence for chatbots, personal assistants, help desks. Recognising the need to personalise chatbots Susi also provides a platform to personalise skills to a user’s requirements.
About Scikit-image
Scikit-image is an open source image processing library for the Python which includes collection of algorithms for segmentation,color space manipulation, analysis, filtering etc. It’s largely written in Python, with some core algorithms written in Cython to achieve performance. Scikit-image is designed to interoperate with the Python numerical and scientific libraries NumPy and SciPy.
What we’ve done so far and some unexpected events :O
Time indeed flies. While working with SusiAI Server, we’ve already sifted through the large code base, understood it, made small PRs here and there, learnt git, understood what a frontend architecture like react does and realized the effort a community puts in maintaining a project. However, between all this work, we realised that the goals of our mentors and that of RGSOC aren’t aligned. After some deliberation, our supervisor and RGSOC organisors chose to change our project. Thus, we are now assigned Scikit-image, which was infact our first choice of project :p